Page 152 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 131

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS
advertising campaigns, as did pictures of Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 state
visit to Moscow and shots of George Bush meeting foreign dignitaries in his
capacity as vice-president.
The prevalence of these techniques, which are now routinely used by all
parties, has generated debate within the journalistic profession about the
extent to which, by allowing the politicians to flood the campaign environ-
ment with pseudo-events of this kind, they are contributing to the degrada-
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tion of political culture and the manipulation of the audience. As a result,
recent election campaigns have witnessed journalists adopting a considerably
more sceptical approach to the pseudo-event. Political coverage now
frequently includes, not merely an account of the event, but a critique – meta-
coverage – of its status as an event and how it has been covered. In the case
of Labour’s Sheffield rally, as already noted, this meta-discourse became
seriously critical. Today, politicians construct their pseudo-events in ways
which acknowledge their ‘constructedness’.
All political news management, indeed, now operates in a context of
ongoing journalistic commentary about the ‘game’ of politics (McNair,
2000). Journalists are aware of the efforts made to influence their coverage,
and include analysis of these efforts as part of their reportage. Political
journalism, as a result, is increasingly focused on matters of process rather
than policy, on the hidden meanings behind the surface appearance of
political events. Some observers are critical of this ‘relentless emphasis on the
cynical game of politics’ (Fallows, 1996, p. 31), warning that it diverts the
citizens’ attention from the ‘real issues’. The then Labour Home Secretary
Jack Straw, for example, criticised ‘the quality of political journalism’ in
Britain at the height of the ‘cash-for-contracts’ scandal in 1998. In this case,
the Observer newspaper reported that lobbyists associated with the Labour
government (and at least one, Roger Liddle, in its employ at the time) were
selling their (claimed) privileged access to business clients. This kind of
‘process’ journalism, argued Straw, was squeezing substantive coverage of
policy out of the media, to be replaced by trivia. On the other hand – and
the frantic efforts of the Labour leadership to discredit the Observer story
when it broke in July 1998 might be thought to reinforce this point –
journalistic monitoring and deconstruction of the political process, including
the behind-the-scenes efforts of the lobbyists (see below), are arguably the
citizens’ best defence against the increasingly sophisticated efforts of the
politicians and their media advisers to create favourable media images of
their clients.
Finally, under the category of media management, we turn to the news
conference, in which political actors make public statements before
audiences of journalists, which are then transmitted by print and broadcast
media to the wider citizenry. News conferences present politicians with
opportunities to set media agendas and thus influence public debate during
election campaigns, as in the routine pursuit of politics between elections.

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